Description

German History from the Margins offers new ways of thinking about ethnic and religious minorities and other outsiders in modern German history. Many established paradigms of German history are challenged by the contributors’ new and often provocative findings, including evidence of the striking cosmopolitanism of Germany’s 19th-century eastern border communities; German Jewry’s sophisticated appropriation of the discourse of tribe and race; the unexpected absence of antisemitism in Weimar’s campaign against smut; the Nazi embrace of purportedly "Jewish" sexual behavior; and post-war West Germany’s struggles with ethnic and racial minorities despite its avowed liberalism. Germany’s minorities have always been active partners in defining what it is to be German, and even after 1945, despite the legacy of the Nazis’ murderous destructiveness, German society continues to be characterized by ethnic and cultural diversity.

Author Bio

Neil Gregor is Reader in Modern German History at the University of Southampton.

Nils Roemer is Lecturer in Jewish History at the James Parkes Centre, University of Southampton.

Reviews

“Germany’s minorities have always been active partners in defining what it is to be German. German History from the Margins offers new ways of thinking about ethnic and religious minorities and other outsiders in modern German history. ”

Customer Reviews

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman1. Germans of the Jewish Stamm: Visions of Community between Nationalism and Particularism, 1850 to 1933 Till van Rahden2. Identity and Essentialism: Race, Racism, and the Jews at the Fin de Siècle Yfaat Weiss3. Prussia at the Margins, or the World That Nationalism Lost Helmut Walser Smith4. Völkisch-Nationalism and Universalism on the Margins of the Reich: A Comparison of Majority and Minority Liberalism in Germany, 1898<N>1933 Eric Kurlander5. "Volksgemeinschaften unter sich": German Minorities and Regionalism in Poland, 1918<N>39 Winson Chu6. A Margin at the Center: The Conservatives in Lower Saxony between Kaiserreich and Federal Republic Frank Bösch7. "Black-Red-Gold Enemies": Catholics, Socialists, and Jews in Elementary Schoolbooks from Kaiserreich to Third Reich Katharine Kennedy8. "Productivist" and "Consumerist" Narratives of Jews in German History Gideon Reuveni9. How "Jewish" is German Sexuality? Sex and Antisemitism in the Third Reich Dagmar Herzog10. Defeated Germans and Surviving Jews: Gendered Encounters in Everyday Life in U.S.-Occupied Germany, 1945<N>49 Atina Grossmann11. Afro-German Children and the Social Politics of Race after 1945 Heide Fehrenbach12. The Difficult Task of Managing Migration: The 1973 Recruitment Stop Karen Schönwälder13. How and Where Is German History Centered? Geoff EleyContributorsIndex